A greatest hits collection from one of Britain’s best-loved poets, Wendy Cope’s The Orange contains themes of love, friendship, family and mortality. The 1992 title poem – which recently enjoyed a second life on TikTok, with users showing off their fruit-based tattoos – finds the author buying a large orange, sharing it with two friends and concluding: “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” After the Lunch is about falling in love on Waterloo Bridge while “high on the charm and the drink”, while Being Boring hails the virtues of a drama-free life (“No news is good news, and long may it last”).
Cope is the reader, her delivery gently understated and frequently deadpan. In Loss, she reflects on the end of a relationship in which the woman “went through hell. His absence wasn’t a problem, but the corkscrew had gone as well.” Sometimes she breaks from the narration to share the context of a poem. She describes attending a conference in America where one evening she found herself the only woman at a table of men, inspiring the poem Men Talking: “If you’re with several blokes, it’s anecdotes and jokes. If you were to die / Of boredom, there and then / They’d notice by and by, if you were to die. // But it could take a while.”
Contemplating her twilight years in The End, Cope thanks “my glasses, hearing aids, dental implant, walking stick, inhalers, statins and carefully rationed painkillers. I am glad to be alive as I walk the last mile or two through the valley of the shadow.”
• Available via Faber & Faber, 47 min
Further listening
The Leopard in My House
Mark Steel, Penguin Audio, 6hr 36mins
The comedian reads his memoir detailing his cancer diagnosis, which he compares to having a dangerous animal locked in a room in one’s home.
Conclave
Robert Harris, Penguin Audio, 8hr 21mins
The Pope is dead and the cardinals must elect a successor. Roy McMillan narrates Harris’s gripping drama, which is now an award-winning film starring Ralph Fiennes.
